Editorial: ‘Presidents Day’ is worth celebrating

Published 9:34 pm, Sunday, February 14, 2016

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ASSOCIATED PRESS
An honor cordon is in place during a Presidential Full Honor Wreath-Laying Ceremony in celebration of the 207th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 12, at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. less

ASSOCIATED PRESS
An honor cordon is in place during a Presidential Full Honor Wreath-Laying Ceremony in celebration of the 207th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 12, at the Lincoln Memorial in ... more

Photo: AP

Editorial: ‘Presidents Day’ is worth celebrating

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The third Monday in February in one of those three-day weekend holidays that is an enigma for most Americans. While common parlance refers to it as Presidents Day, it technically isn’t.

And it always seems to sneak up on us. That is, of course, unless you happen to be selling mattresses, furniture, automobiles or ski-lift tickets. Those folks know that it’s true purpose is for a “blowout sale.”

Things get even more confused when the holiday falls, as it does this year, one day after Valentine’s Day.

The truth is that to most Americans this Monday has little significance beyond being just another three-day holiday. In fact, it is so nondescript that many commonly refer to it as Presidents Day weekend rather than Presidents Day.

To be fair, though, that was actually the intent behind the current incarnation of the holiday.

In 1968, after much wrangling, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which officially took effect in 1971 following an executive order from President Richard Nixon. It was part of a plan to shift a number of holidays to specific Mondays with the express intent of creating three-day holidays. The bill was strongly supported by both organized labor and retailers. Let’s face it, when those groups can find common ground on an issue, they get what they want in Congress.

The act shifted Washington’s Birthday from the fixed date of Feb. 22 — Washington’s actual birthday — to the third Monday of February. The nation had unofficially observed Feb. 22 as a holiday from 1800 — the year after Washington’s death — until 1879, when President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill that cleared the way for it to be an official national holiday.

Sponsors of the 1968 bill floated the idea of calling the new holiday Presidents Day because Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 12 birthday was celebrated as a holiday in many states. But Virginia senators — Washington’s home state — objected loudly. The holiday name technically remained as Washington’s Birthday.

But by the mid-2000s many states chose to call the holiday Presidents Day. And it is no longer about just one man, or, for that matter, even two men. It now is popularly considered a holiday to celebrate all of the nation’s chief executives.

The delicious irony there is that only four presidents were born in the month of February — Washington, Lincoln, William Henry Harrison and Ronald Reagan — but none of them is born on a day that can ever be the third Monday of February.

Presidents Day deserves a nod for reminding us to be grateful we live in a country that has effectively transferred power from one chief executive to the next for more than two centuries, which really is something worth celebrating.